1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to providing an indication of performance of a storage device. More particularly, the invention relates to systems and methods for indication of an activity status of a storage device.
2. Description of Related Art
In a contemporary hard disk drive (HDD) design, maintenance work performed in the background becomes an integral part of drive activities. Maintenance, such as cache flush, adjacent track interference refresh, and disk scan for grown defects are considered essential for data integrity and drive reliability protection. Since host commands are considered the highest priority in terms of command execution, however, such maintenance work may be deferred until the drive is idled. Unfortunately, in a high duty cycle environment, such maintenance may be deferred until some of the background activities become critical. In those situations, the performance of critical background activities may result in an undesired loss in host performance (but not loss in data integrity due to safeguards in the system).
In existing systems, a hard disk drive performing critical background activities may not be acceptably responsive to a host computer. The host computer may then be forced to wait to retrieve data from or wait to have data written to the hard disk drive.
Some systems allow the host computer to write data to or retrieve data from multiple hard disk drives (e.g., a host computer in communication with a data farm). If a first hard disk drive is otherwise occupied with background activities, the host computer may wait a period of time and, if the first hard disk drive remains occupied or busy performing other tasks, the host computer may then redirect the task to a second hard disk drive. The wait time, however, is an inefficient use of resources. Further, the second hard disk drive may also be occupied and therefore requiring additional wait time.